IPHONE NEWS

John Carmack 'regrets missing the iPhone launch'

But he has some impressively big plans for its future

Founder of id Software and game engine mechanic extraordinaire, John Carmack, has spoken to Forbes about his vision for the iPhone's potential.

"The iPhone, as a device, is in the same generation power-wise as the PS2 or Xbox," Carmack says. "The graphics are a little lower but the RAM is a lot higher. You could easily spend $10 million on an iPhone game, but the market just can't support that yet."

id Software has made some significant inroads into mobile gaming recently, with the id Mobile label, and given the company's reputation for building system-pushing technologies, it's an exciting prospect that Carmack sees the latent possibilities of the iPhone as a major gaming platform.

"We have a title we want to develop exclusively for iPhone," he continues. "I'm not announcing anything specifically, but it would be a graphical tour de force.

"I want to go step by step, where we do a multiplayer game, then multiplayer with some persistence, then maybe further. We don't want to be in a bet-the-company situation at this moment."

President of id Mobile, Anna Kang, agrees with Carmack's perception of the iPhone's potential.

"If we had an infinite amount of time and budget, we could make an awesome massively multiplayer game," she says. "But the whole idea of id Mobile is we can make something good, and we can make it quick."

While it's light on details right now, the prospect of this visionary gaming company setting its sights firmly on unlocking the iPhone's capabilities and inherent connectivity makes this a news story well worth following.